Found this article on a German town that’s radically improved it’s flow of traffic and it’s safety by eliminating all it’s street signs and radically simplifying the rules of the road.  Check it out:

Because Bohmte’s main street is a state highway, the town cannot forbid truck traffic. Mayor Klaus Goedejohann knew that the heavy traffic spoilt the town’s atmosphere, but that it also provided the town’s livelihood. “How do we manage to meet the interest of all the traffic participants without excluding anybody?” he recalls thinking.

Then Mr. Goedejohann heard of a radical traffic-management philosophy called “shared space.” Pioneered by a Dutch engineer who thought towns were safer with fewer rules, it envisioned open surfaces on which motorists and pedestrians could “negotiate” with one another by eye contact, other signals, and a greater consideration for one another.

Segregating cars and pedestrians was wrong, argued Hans Monderman, whose death this winter rekindled people’s interest in his ideas. Portrayed as a dangerous maverick decades ago, Mr. Monderman put in place more than 100 shared-space schemes in the Netherlands. When the European Union launched a research project on shared space, Bohmte decided to try it, along with six other towns, including Ostend in Belgium and Ipswich in England.

…

Goedejohann, Bohmte’s mayor, is confident. His town averaged 50 accidents last year. Since the shared space concept was enacted, there haven’t been any, he says.

And other city governments are reacting. In Hamburg a new coalition of green and conservative politicians have pledged to design shared space streets in every neighborhood.

“My theory,” Monderman said last fall at a new urbanism summit in London, “was if you want to make people behave in a village, maybe you have to make it feel like a village.”

from “Are towns really safer without traffic lights?”

Pretty cool.